


The Making of a Sanctuary

by LadyHallen



Series: Sanctuary [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Do not repost, Don't copy to another site, Gen, Time Travel, accidental adoption, children adopting people, harry has severe PTSD here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:54:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27363058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyHallen/pseuds/LadyHallen
Summary: The first child of the Sanctuary was a boy.By the time Harry had the sense to look around, the children had multiplied.
Relationships: Harry Potter & a lot of children, Harry Potter & the Sanctuary
Series: Sanctuary [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1998565
Comments: 51
Kudos: 565





	The Making of a Sanctuary

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my folders for YEARS. welp, gotta post it I guess. Or else I'll accidentally delete it....

The first child of the Sanctuary was a boy.

He was a street urchin but Harry, passing by him on the street, felt the magic and paused. With a distracted air, Harry rummaged through his bags and produced a piece of bread.

Harry handed the child the bread and left.

But the child remembered.

The next day, when Harry realized that he needed more cheese, he passed by the same child and gave him another piece of bread.

The child devoured the bread, latched on to Harry’s cloak, and then doesn’t let go.

Harry looked at the boy with complete and utter bewilderment and just sighed. He found it a bit difficult to say no to children. It was a really bad weakness that was exploited with the puppy eyes mercilessly.

They’re like locusts and multiply.

The first child grabbed another one, and another one, and before Harry knew it, there’s an entire group of children living with him.

“We can’t keep living off of bread and cheese,” Harry said with some shock, because he hadn’t realized how many children there were with him. “And oh Merlin, what are you all wearing?”

The first one gave him a look, being bolder and less afraid of him. “It’s better than sleeping cold.”

Because of course, everyone was sleeping by the fireplace. Why hadn’t he noticed? He knew he could get preoccupied inside his head, being in the past made it especially worse, but this was ridiculous. By his count, there were fifteen children around him, eagerly pressing into each other for warmth.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” he groaned. “I know I can get distracted, but this is ridiculous.”

With a wave of his wand, he conjured them all some blankets. It would disappear in two hours but it was better than the rags everyone was wearing.

“Now, let’s fix this. Rooms, right,” he muttered. But I also need some wood.” He glanced out and smiled. “How convenient, there’s a forest right there.”

.

* * *

.

Harry worked with a lot of children scurrying around underfoot.

Magic may have made things easier, but it didn’t fix everything. He still had to chop up the wood with precise slicing spells, peel off the bark and then speed up the drying process. Afterwards, measuring and then covering everything in varnish.

All the while, the idea of dorm rooms entered his mind and he knew how he wanted things to look like. Because he might not have planned for children, but these children only had him.

Next, he enlarged the space as he worked.

It took immense focus but he knew that it could happen. Newt Scamander could fit an entire world inside his suitcase, Harry could fit entire dormitories behind his pantry.

“What are we going to do for beds?” Simon, the first child, asked him.

Harry pursed his lips in thought. “I can make beds, we have enough wood to make furniture for all those rooms. It will require cotton and cloth though.”

That was a thought. Harry needed cotton and cloth and they also needed more food than just bread and cheese. Harry…might have to buy some animals.

.

“What do we need?” Harry murmured, sitting on the floor and surrounded by a circle of children as they divided a loaf of bread and a wheel of cheese. There was also a bowl of vegetable soup, one of the few things he could make without burning down the kitchen. It was a testament to how tired everyone was with the bread and cheese that the soup had absolutely no leftovers.

“Clothes,” Lina said, looking at her ratty old shirt. “A place to wash.”

“Food,” Simon piped in.

Harry could go to gardens and get some seedlings, no need to buy things. Some places even had wild vegetables and a good Point Me charm would solve that. He also needed clothes, bed sheets, mattresses and winter clothes - it was getting colder.

The animals though. He could buy them in the muggle world so it would be cheaper, but it would take some money, which he did not have.

“We need to brew,” he sighed. “Who knows how to chop?”

.

Harry took one week teaching the children different potion techniques.

Slicing, dicing, chopping and their differences were taught. He never realized children had such attention spans. They practiced on vegetables and Harry’s soup making skills were getting better and better.

“Okay, that’s sufficient. Now, we need potion ingredients and a good store to sell our potions afterwards,” he said.

The only store that would accept such _shady_ practices (because you needed a license to brew, which Harry absolutely does not have) would be one in Knockturn Alley.

This time, he placed his foot down. “You’re all staying in the house. Where I’m going is not good for children.”

As one, they all rolled their eyes at him but did not argue.

.

* * *

.

It took more than a hundred potions before their funds could be sufficient and Harry gained a permanent wrinkle in his forehead from the stress. Being in charge of the health and well-being of more than a dozen little individuals was very stressful, especially if you were an unlicensed time-traveler.

Harry bought two pairs, a male and a female, for each animal. There were pigs, cows and chickens for their produce, which would help immensely for the food problem. He also bought sheep for their wool.

“Flax seeds,” he remarked, looking at his list. “I think I found the solution to the cloth problem.”

Flax seeds were unmagical and could be fast grown and fast harvested. Then, he figured out how to enchant a loom to weave it into bolts of cloth.

“It’s so pretty,” Katy said with awe. “But. Harry, isn’t it a bit boring, to be plain white?”

Harry looked at them all and was encountered with a dozen puppy eyes.

“…Dye’s. A lot of them,” he muttered reluctantly.

He pretended not to see the children exchanging a high-five behind him.

.

* * *

.

It would be so much easier, Harry realized halfway into transforming his house into a secret place for orphaned and neglected children, if he had someone to work with.

But given that what he was doing was breaking about a hundred laws, he really didn’t want to implicate someone with him.

His kitchen was already a teeming mess of food and soup was always bubbling in the stove, somehow never boiling over and also never running out, no matter how many children ladled out bowls.

His pantry was always expanding, meat and eggs somehow multiplying without his knowledge. And milk was never running out.

His vegetable garden never seemed to run out of produce either, carrots, beans and potatoes always popping out of the ground whenever he needed some.

His cloth room, formerly just housing one lonely loom and one lonely dye area, was having three stations and continually making more bolts of cloth than he knew what to deal with.

Even the Potion’s area was expanding, somehow having fifteen working stations and ten rows of potions cupboards organized alphabetically.

Something was always going on and he was permanently frowning with worry.

Children weren’t supposed to learn how to brew advanced high grade potions at the age of eight, nor were they supposed to know how to cook, clean, do laundry or tend to plants.

But the children he had gotten were all mature beyond their years, scars marking them from the very people who were supposed to love them unconditionally. And they all loved Harry and knew he was doing his best to give them a home.

.

* * *

.

Harry eventually realized by the time he had fifty children that he needed to set an age limit.

Because if he didn’t, none of the children would ever really _leave_ and then he would be stuck with a hundred of them. He loved them and he knew that the Sanctuary was supposed to be a place to have a childhood.

So he started setting up apprenticeships.

Simon, a budding arithmancer, got an apprenticeship to a wardmaster. Lina with her sewing skills was apprenticed to Madame Malkin. Jessica, the sweet child, was apprenticed to a librarian until she realized what she wanted.

All of the children needed help and he set out and found them work and different houses. And all of them realized this and quietly packed their bags and left.

Harry still kept in contact with them via owls and the occasional visit. And he missed them even if there were always new children coming to him. But he never mourned. Because it was at this time that he started noticing something.

The Sanctuary was starting to gain sentience.

It made some sense, given that once an object was in magical presence long enough and _loved enough_ , they tended to gain a personality.

The Sanctuary had housed _a lot_ of children and all of them loved it in their own way. And all of those children had been magical.

By the time he realized _what_ was harvesting the garden, cleaning the house, unclogging the toilets and keeping the kitchen stocked, he had gone through three generations and there was an unofficial network of people that apprenticed his children without his prompting. People he remembered, _children_ he remembered, all of them growing old, but…he remained the same.

“Circe’s wand, what have I created?” he murmured.

.

A singularity. He had created a singularity because the children needed him.

Hogwarts, while just as loved, was not a singularity but a nexus. It didn’t exist beyond time like the Sanctuary, but it had a draw to it that made it attractive to everyone. His Sanctuary, on the other hand, existed only to those who needed it.

Harry knew that if he spent decades away from the Sanctuary, he would start to age. The children were immune, the Sanctuary didn’t own them in the way it owned Harry. His blood and his magic went into the house. The children were only guests.

He had accidentally bound himself to a singularity and he had absolutely no idea what to do about it.

.

Harry started to have no concept of time.

Oh, he knew the days were passing, and he knew what month it was. But the years passing by he viewed them as just any other day.

He didn’t really need to keep track of holidays, the house decorated itself and nudged him to remember. He only really remembered about the start of term, because all those children needed him for book shopping. Two months before the start of term, he would start a frenzy of brewing just to be able to afford everything.

Thank Merlin that Wizarding Currency hasn’t changed since the Goblin Wars.

All the children that passed, he remembered. The memories might be blurry, but he knew all of them. He kept memory strands for each child, in case his memory ever faltered.

And then Tom Riddle requested Sanctuary and Harry became _acutely_ aware of the passing of time.

Cute, teenage dark lords with wounded, angry eyes and a desperate need for praise.

Cute, teenage dark lords, who looked at the Sanctuary and seemed not to understand the age limit.

Cute, teenage dark lords, who wanted to stay forever.

Harry would bang his head on the wall if the House would allow it.

.

* * *

.

When he’d accidentally travelled back in time, he had a plan.

Buy a house, keep quiet and don’t make any trouble.

Looking up at the deceptively small house, he knew that plan was thrown out the window since the first child looked up at him and tugged at his cloak.

“Harry!” called a young, high voice. “Harry, I already rang the dinner bell, didn’t you hear?”

“I’m coming!” he yelled back, pausing briefly to pluck an apple tree that he’s sure he _did not_ plant there.

The Sanctuary was sentient and it had absolutely no qualms in growing how it wanted, asking no input from Harry.

This was not in his plans, but he had no complaints.

**Author's Note:**

> I know, I know, it sucks. My grammar is all over the place and there's no continuity. But. It's a sequel, I guess?
> 
> Comments please. Be nice to me.


End file.
